David Walliams is by some distance the bestselling author in Ireland in 2017.
Children’s author Walliams has sold an astonishing 177,045 books to date and his latest offering Bad Dad, published only last month, is the bestselling title with 45,062 sales.
Walliams, who received the international recognition award at the Irish Book Awards in Dublin last month, has 13 books in the top 100.
Nielsen Book Research has just revealed the 250 bestselling titles in Ireland for 2017. The figures are up to December 16th and exclude Christmas week, which is the busiest of the year for book sales.
Bad Dad has sold 16,000 more copies than the second highest selling book in Ireland in 2017. The Couple Next Door by Canadian author Shari Lapena, about a baby who goes missing during a dinner party, sold 28,856 copies.
The bestselling Irish author of 2017 is television presenter Graham Norton whose novel, Holding, which was released in 2016, has notched up 23,516 sales to date in Ireland this year. Holding was last year's No1 bestselling Irish novel, selling 51,814 copies.
The next bestselling Irish book is Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen’s breakout hit Oh My God What a Complete Aisling the Novel which has sold 22,647 copies.
The character of Aisling, the quintessential country girl living and working in the Big Smoke, grew out of a Facebook page created by the authors in 2008, which now has more than 40,000 followers.
The novel was published by Gill Books in August and was an instant success. Two further Aisling books are planned.
Marian Keyes is the only other Irish author to have more than 20,000 sales in 2017. Her novel The Break sold 20,536 copies. Sebastian Barry's Days Without End, which came out last year and won the Costa Book of the Year Award in January, sold 18,864 copies.
The continuing adventures of Ross O'Carroll Kelly proved to be ever popular with Irish readers. Paul Howard's Operation Trumpsformation has sales of 17,027 copies so far this year. The other books that make up the top 10 bestselling Irish fiction titles were: Orange Blossom Days by Patricia Scanlan; The Good Mother by Sinead Moriarty, The Missing Wife by Sheila O'Flanagan; The Gospel According to Blindboy by Blindboy Boatclub; and The Wedding Promise by Emma Hannigan.
Ruth Fitzmaurice's I Found My Tribe has sold almost 14,000 copies in Ireland since its release. It arose out of an Irish Times article she wrote following her husband Simon's diagnosis for Motor Neurone Disease (MND). Mr Fitzmaurice died earlier this year.
Dublin footballer Philly McMahon's autobiography The Choice was the bestselling sports book in Ireland in 2017 with 13,379 sales. His story of how he managed to escape the drug culture that ravaged the Ballymun community he grew up in and claimed the life of his brother also won sports book of the year at the Irish Book Awards in 2017.
Caroline Foran’s book Owning It: Your Bullsh*t-Free Guide to Living with Anxiety, which also arose out of an Irish Times article, was a bestseller in 2017 selling almost 13,000 copies.
Cork University Press’s The Atlas of the Irish Revolution has been the publishing phenomenon of the year along with being voted by the public poll as the Irish book of the year in the Irish Book Awards.
Weighing in at nearly 1,000 pages and costing €59, it sold out its first print run of 8,000 and a further 14,000 copies were printed. It has sold 12,173 copies to date.
Top 10 bestsellers
David Walliams Bad Dad
Shari Lapena The Couple Next Door
Jeff Kinney Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Getaway (book 12): Diary of a Wimpy Kid
David Walliams The World's Worst Children 2
Graham Norton Holding
Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen Oh My God What a Complete Aisling
Guinness World Records 2018
Paula Hawkins Into the Water
Marian Keyes The Break
Sebastian Barry Days Without End
